Putting America to Work

Byand
large, historians have credited President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his
New Deal for getting the United States out of the Great Depression.
From time to time salvos are lobbed from conservative bunkers, such as
Amity Shlaes’ anti-New Deal tome of last year, The Forgotten Man. But
like so many other books of its kind, it failed to land a lethal hit,
and meanwhile the ranks of New Deal defenders continue to be
replenished.

The latest enlistee is Nick Taylor’s American-MadeThe Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (Bantam).
It is an admiring (and admirable) history of FDR’s main job-creation
program, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Taylor, author of
several other popular histories, has produced what is likely the most
complete account yet of the much-written-about agency, just in time for
the 75th anniversary of the New Deal.

Two related criticisms
of the New Deal have been that (1) it did nothing to alleviate the
Depression, and (2) therefore Roosevelt should have gotten out of the
way to let the marketplace return us to stability, as it would do in
the long run. But Taylor asserts that the first is a negative
that has never been proven. And secondly, as John Maynard Keynes said,
“Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we
are all dead.” Fifteen million men and women were out of work, 34
million had no income whatsoever, and many were literally starving.
Doing nothing was a failed policy.

Keynes, of course, was an
advocate of deficit spending, a practice that the 32nd president seems
to have embraced with less enthusiasm than our current leader.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt was willing to have the country go into debt if
it would get his countrymen back to work.

And that is
precisely what the WPA did. Harry Hopkins, a former social worker, ran
it tirelessly and honestly, guarding itat FDR’s insistencefrom
partisan political meddling. It lasted eight years, from 1935 to 1943
(when burgeoning war work made it unnecessary), and during that period
spent $10.5 billion and employed 8.5 million people. Its success can be
gauged by the praise even today from families who were helped.

WPA
workers built roads, schools, bridges and dams. They sewed clothes,
stuffed mattresses, repaired toys, rescued flood victims, painted
murals in public buildings, performed plays, played music and wrote
guides to the 48 states. They did almost everything but direct military
work, and even there they modernized neglected Army and Air Force
bases. Despite its success, some people then and now bitterly condemned
the New Deal because it represented a seismic shift in governmental
philosophy: that the welfare of the people is a federal obligation.

This
is the core complaint of its opponents, believers in a rugged
individualism that says people pull themselves up by their own
bootstraps, even when they have no boots (or feet). Taylor notes that
the WPA was “the most excoriated program of the entire New Deal.” Its
workers were labeled shovel-leaners, its projects boondoggles (a word
that was born of the criticism), its entire operation a hotbed of
communists.

For instance, the New York airport that WPA helped
buildthe city had no airport of its own thenand that was named for
the mayor at the time, Fiorello LaGuardia, was derided as a colossal
boondoggle. Yet it proved to be an enormous business magnet from the
day its doors and runways opened.

Among the WPA’s many project
cate- gories, the arts drew the most heat, especially theater and
visual arts. Music employed the most people among the arts projects;
just one of countless facts included by Taylor. American-Made is
well written and helpfully structured with short chapters that keep the
mass of facts from becoming overwhelming. Taylor intersperses
individual stories to give body to stark statistics, such as that of
Grace Overbee, who delivered books via horseback to grateful readers
isolated in the hills of Kentucky.

Taylor is unquestionably on the side of FDR and the New Deal; nevertheless, American-Made is,
to borrow a phrase, fair and balanced. The author admits WPA’s miscues
and flops, its cronyism and corruption at the local level (but not at
the top), and the ups and downs it experienced in raising employment
overall.

He also notes that the WPA operated remarkably
efficiently. Especially telling are its startlingly low administrative
costs4% of total spending. “The Roosevelt administration placed an
extraordinary bet on ordinary people, and the nation realized a
remarkable return,” Taylor writes. Indeed, as Roosevelt said in a 1932
campaign speech, it put its faith in “the forgotten man.”

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